Martell Randolph, a Los Angeles activist, spends hours surrounded
by other HIVers. But she often feels as alone as PWAs did in the early
years when no one knew what the hell had hit them. The soft-spoken
Randolph has HIV 2, the strain common in West Africa but rare in the
U.S.—and tricky to treat (see “A Different Duck,”below.) “The most
frustrating thing,” she says, “is that I’ve never met another person
with HIV 2.” In fact, the feds report a mere 132 U.S. cases, although
some experts fear that there are many more undiagnosed—not least among
the estimated 300,000 HIVers who have never been tested.

Randolph,
now 42, fell ill in 1999. She’d had a monogamous relationship with an
African man in Rome in 1990, but “didn’t suspect anything amiss.” After
two inconclusive HIV tests, Randolph “started to freak out.” A coworker
at New York City’s GMHC sent her to Manuel Revuelta, MD—one of a
handful of HIV 2–savvy U.S. docs—who solved the mystery. Hospitalized
with PCP pneumonia and 13 T cells, Randolph felt “life was closing in
on me.”

Slowly, she climbed out of the hole. On solo Kaletra
(reasonable for HIV 2, which moves slower than HIV 1), her T cells hit
900—“the most miraculous turnaround I’d seen,” Revuelta says. But she’s
now resistant to Kaletra and is awaiting tipranavir—in trials for HIV 1
and reputedly effective against HIV 2.“I have to educate the people
taking care of me,” Randolph says—like teaching lab techs that HIV 1
viral-load tests won’t measure HIV 2. She adds, “I hope this story will
help others with HIV 2 find me.” And diagnosis.

A Different Duck How HIV 2 differs from HIV 1:Testing: Western blot, but not ELISA and OraSure, can tell HIV 2 from HIV 1.